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Saturday, 6 August 2016

The Cape of Good Hope

A peculiar delusion exists among the old PW Botha Fan Club that until very recently occupied even 10 Downing Street, that the British Left has some especial attachment to the present government of South Africa.

Anyone who thinks that has obviously not been reading the Morning Star, or watching the television programmes of George Galloway.

Nor have they been attending the Durham Miners' Gala, which the late Davey Hopper used to great effect to spread awareness of the massacre at Marikana.

Not least in terms of its powerful parallels with Orgreave, parallels that I have heard movingly articulated by the survivors of both events.

The David Camerons of the world will wait in vain for any sort of apology for the Liberation Struggle. Even Norman Tebbit has long said that none was due. But it was a long time ago.

And even on the BBC, its surviving veterans have been speaking today as those of us who have been paying attention have known them to have been speaking for quite some time.

That a defeat such as the ANC has just been dealt can happen is a sign of South Africa's democratic maturity.

But that that defeat has been dealt, that the voters have been moved to deal it, is a situation entirely of the ANC's own making.

Cameron got an incredibly free pass over South Africa. He was the apartheid regime's all expenses paid guest when he was marked out as a star of the future. Corbyn and Abbott get grief just because they once had some fairly comical motorcycling holiday through East Germany at their own expense.

Indeed. She never saw a Maoist whom she did not like. She installed Mugabe, having refused any other settlement, and she even arranged a knighthood for him. Then there was Ceaușescu. Then there was Pol Pot.

When Nelson Mandela died, her flame-keepers could be heard criticising him and his for their criticism, in turn, of Steve Biko.

As for the Rightist regimes, people understandably emphasise the Pinochet connection, with its huge practical impact on her domestic economic policy. She really did want, and try, to turn Britain into Pinchet's Chile. That was, explicitly, her model.

But for sheer comedy, albeit of the very blackest kind, you cannot beat the fact that she had been about to flog at a knocked down rate to her mates in Argentina the very ships that she then found that she had to deploy against them when they took her at her word and invaded the Falkland Islands.